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La favorite (The Favorite, sometimes referred to by its Italian title: La favorita) is a grand opera in four acts by Gaetano Donizetti to a French-language libretto by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz, based on the play Le comte de Comminges by Baculard d'Arnaud. It premiered on 2 December 1840 at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris, France.
Originally, Donizetti had been composing an opera by the name of Le Duc d'Albe as his second work for the Opéra in Paris. However, the director, Léon Pillet, objected to an opera without a prominent role for his mistress, mezzo-soprano Rosine Stoltz. Donizetti therefore abandoned Le Duc d'Albe and borrowed heavily from L'ange de Nisida, an unrealized project from 1839, to create La favorite. It was revived in Padua under the title of Leonora di Guzman in 1842, and at La Scala as Elda in 1843 with Marietta Alboni in the title role. Though Donizetti himself was not involved in these productions, the opera is now more commonly given in Italian rather than French.
Donizetti wrote the entire final act in three to four hours, with the exception of the cavatina and a part of a duet, which were added at the rehearsal stage.
Industry:Drama
Feast in Time of Plague is an opera (literally labeled "dramatic scenes") in one act by César Cui, composed in 1900. The libretto was taken verbatim from one of the four Little Tragedies by Aleksandr Pushkin. The title has been translated also as Feast in the Time of the Plague and Feast during the Plague.
Cui composed and published the two songs in the play (i.e., "Mary's Song" and "Walsingham's Hymn") separately in the decade before the opera was formally composed.
The opera was premiered on 11 November 1901 (Old Style), in Moscow at the Noviy Theater. Although it never became part of the standard repertory, Feast was revived by the Tchaikovsky Opera in Perm, Russia in 1999 as part of a Pushkin-bicentennial performance of all four of the operatic settings of the Little Tragedies, i.e., Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest, Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, and Rachmaninoff's The Miserly Knight.
Feast was given its American premiere on October 14, 2009 by the Little Opera Theater of New York, directed by Philip Shneidman.
A CD recording of Feast was issued on the Chandos label in 2004, with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra under Valery Polyansky.
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Fedora is an opera in three acts by Umberto Giordano to an Italian libretto by Arturo Colautti, based on the play Fédora by Victorien Sardou. Along with Andrea Chénier and Siberia, it is one of the most notable works of Giordano. It was first performed at the Teatro Lirico in Milan on November 17, 1898 conducted by the composer with Gemma Bellincioni creating the role of Fedora, and Enrico Caruso as her lover, Loris Ipanov.
Its first performance was in Milan at the Teatro Lirico Internazionale on November 17, 1898 with Gemma Bellincioni as Fedora, and Enrico Caruso as Loris Ipanov. The opera had great success on its opening night, and was soon brought to the Vienna Staatsoper by Mahler, and then to Paris where it was reportedly admired by both Massenet and Saint-Saëns.
Fedora received its US premiere on December 5, 1906 at the New York Metropolitan Opera, with Caruso as Count Loris, Lina Cavalieri as Fedora, and Arturo Vigna conducting. Fedora received eight performances during the Met's 1906/1907 and 1907/1908 seasons, and was revived in the 1920s when it received 25 more performances between 1923 and 1926. By the mid-20th century, however, operatic tastes had changed, and the opera became more sporadically performed.
The 1990s saw a resurgence of interest in Fedora, with new productions at the Vienna Staatsoper, La Scala, The New York Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Washington National Opera and the Buenos Aires Teatro Colón. Notable singers in post-1990 productions include Mirella Freni, Renata Scotto, Agnes Baltsa, Katia Ricciarelli, and Maria Guleghina as Fedora; and Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and José Cura as Loris. Among Fedora's most recent performances are those at the Vienna Staatsoper in 2003, La Scala in 2004, and London's Holland Park Opera in 2006.
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Die Feen (pronounced , The Fairies) is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. The German libretto was written by the composer after Carlo Gozzi's La donna serpente. Die Feen was Wagner's first completed opera, but remained unperformed in his lifetime. It has never established itself firmly in the operatic repertory although it receives occasional performances, on stage or in concert, most often in Germany. The opera is available on CD; however, it has never been available on video. Additionally, the overture has been separately recorded.
Although the music of Die Feen shows the influences of Carl Maria von Weber and other composers of the time, commentators have recognised embryonic features of the mature Wagnerian opera. The fantasy plot also anticipates themes such as redemption that were to reappear in his later works.
Industry:Drama
Fidelio (Op. 72) is a German opera with spoken dialogue in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is his only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and the 1804 opera Leonora by Ferdinando Paer (a score of which was owned by Beethoven). The opera tells how Leonore, disguised as a prison guard named "Fidelio", rescues her husband Florestan from death in a political prison.
Bouilly's scenario fits Beethoven's aesthetic and political outlook: a story of personal sacrifice, heroism and eventual triumph (the usual topics of Beethoven's "middle period") with its underlying struggle for liberty and justice mirroring contemporary political movements in Europe.
As elsewhere in Beethoven's vocal music, the music is not especially kind to the singers. The principal parts of Leonore and Florestan, in particular, require great vocal skill and endurance in order to project the necessary intensity, and top performances in these roles attract admiration.
Some notable moments in the opera include the "Prisoners' Chorus", an ode to freedom sung by a chorus of political prisoners, Florestan's vision of Leonore come as an angel to rescue him, and the scene in which the rescue finally takes place. The finale celebrates Leonore's bravery with alternating contributions of soloists and chorus.
Industry:Drama
The Fiery Angel (Russian: Огненный ангел — Ognenny angel in transliteration) (Op 37)
Sergei Prokofiev's opera, The Fiery Angel, could be considered one of the composer’s largest challenges. Writing, production, and location were all factors in the piece’s progress. The journey to completion was not truly over until after Prokofiev’s time when the piece was first presented in a full performance at the Theatre des Champs-Elysée on Nove mber 25, 1955, and was first premiered at the Venice Festival in 1955.
The Fiery Angel was met with mixed reviews for different reasons. Largely, The Fiery Angel was, despite lack of productions, reviewed as Prokofiev’s “… strongest and most dramatically intense scores.” In a review of the Bolshoi performance of The Fiery Angel, it is said that Prokofiev’s “…score is crazy, but shouldn’t sound chaotic.” Prokofiev may have only been interested in the overarching story rather than the smaller details. It was also criticized that maybe the language would have been better in French rather than Russian. Some even called the opera a “16th-century Carmen with supernatural trimmings” amongst other mixed reviews. Another criticism is that The Fiery Angel is nothing but confusion and noise with the “modern” title. Using staging should not be there to make up for the music, but to mix with it and make a grand production. Prokofiev was able to write the music how he saw fit, which appealed to many more than the staging has, according to different reviews.
In all, it can be assumed that Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel has had a lot of insight and thought from the composer. He used a novel that interested him very much that was written by a very important author that helped start the Russian symbolist movement. It was a work that reached the brink of public acceptance and came out as a work of great praise, most staging aside.
Industry:Drama
Die Fledermaus (The Bat) is an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée.
The original source for Die Fledermaus is Das Gefängnis (The Prison), a farce by German playwright Julius Roderich Benedix (1811–1873). Another source is the French vaudeville play Le réveillon, by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, which was first translated by Karl Haffner into a non-musical play to be produced in Vienna. However, the peculiarly French custom of the réveillon (a New Year's Eve supper party) caused problems, which were solved by the decision to adapt the play as a libretto for Johann Strauss, with the réveillon replaced by a Viennese ball. At this point Haffner's translation was handed over for adaptation to Richard Genée, who subsequently claimed not only that he had made a fresh translation from scratch but that he had never even met Haffner.
The operetta premièred on 5 April 1874 at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna and has been part of the regular repertoire ever since:
It was performed in New York under Rudolf Bial at the Stadt Theatre on 21 November 1874. The German première took place at Munich's Gärtnerplatztheater in 1875. Die Fledermaus was sung in English at London's Alhambra Theatre on 18 December 1876, with its score modified by Hamilton Clarke.
The first London performance in German did not take place until 1895. According to the archivist of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, "Twenty years after its production as a lyric opera in Vienna, Mahler raised the artistic status of Strauss's work by producing it at the Hamburg Opera House all the leading opera houses in Europe, notably Vienna and Munich, have brightened their regular repertoire by including it for occasional performance."
The role of Eisenstein was originally written for a tenor, but is nowadays frequently sung by a baritone. The role of Orlofsky, a trouser role, is occasionally performed by a tenor or baritone, notably in Vienna.
Industry:Drama
Le flibustier is a comédie lyrique (lyric comedy) in three acts, composed by César Cui during 1888-1889. Although the title can translate as The Pirate or The Buccaneer, this is no swashbuckling action-drama, but an idyllic domestic comedy of mistaken identity.
The opera is based on the like-named play by Jean Richepin, who wrote the libretto, and is dedicated to La Comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau. It premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 22 February 1894, and played for four performances. It was revived in 1908 in a production by students at the Moscow Conservatory under the conductorship of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, and a Russian edition of the piano-vocal score was printed under the title У моря (U morja = By the Sea). Nevertheless, despite the composer's own special fondness for this work, Le Flibustier seems never to have been performed again and never became part of the standard operatic repertoire.
In the year of its premiere, the composer contributed a rare biographical article entitled "Flibustier in Paris" about his experiences with this opera published in the Russian periodical Knizhki nedeli.
The composer extracted an orchestral suite from this work consisting of the initial Prelude, the Dances that close Act I, and the March in Act III.
The French title of the opera has been transliterated into Cyrillic variously as Флибустьер or Флибюстье. Russian renderings of the French title include Морской разбойник (Morskoj razbojnik) and Пират (Pirat), both meaning "pirate."
Industry:Drama
Florencia en el Amazonas (English title: Florencia in the Amazon) is an opera in two acts composed by Daniel Catán. It contains elements of magical realism in the style of Gabriel García Márquez and uses a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, one of his pupils. The characters are inspired by García Márquez, but the story is not drawn directly from any of his works.
Florencia was co-commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and Seattle Opera and premiered in Houston on October 25, 1996. It was the first Spanish-language opera to be commissioned by major United States opera houses.
Industry:Drama
Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), WWV 63, is a German language opera, with libretto and music by Richard Wagner.
Wagner claimed in his 1870 autobiography Mein Leben that he had been inspired to write the opera following a stormy sea crossing he made from Riga to London in July and August 1839. In his 1843 Autobiographic Sketch, Wagner acknowledged he had taken the story from Heinrich Heine's retelling of the legend in his 1833 satirical novel The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski (Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski). The central theme is redemption through love.
Wagner conducted the premiere at the Semper Oper in Dresden in 1843. This work shows early attempts at operatic styles that would characterise his later music dramas. In Der fliegende Holländer Wagner uses a number of leitmotifs (literally, "leading motifs") associated with the characters and themes. The leitmotifs are all introduced in the overture, which begins with a well-known ocean or storm motif before moving into the Dutchman and Senta motifs.
Wagner originally wrote the work to be performed without intermission – an example of his efforts to break with tradition – and, while today's opera houses sometimes still follow this directive, it is also performed in a three-act version.
Industry:Drama
